Well, I voted for Obama, but unless things change (and they could, the next presidential election is a ways off), I won't be doing so again. The first move he made that annoyed me was appointing Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State. I don't like her (and wouldn't have voted for her if she'd have won the Democratic nomination) and disagree with her foreign policy stance, but I understand it. Party loyalty and all that nonsense.

While people are up in arms (on both sides) about health care reform, that's not my issue. If anything, I feel the current proposals don't go far enough. But that's not what's got my goat.

No, what's pissed me off is that he signed into law a bill that banned my preferred brand of smokes, Djarum Blacks, and all other kreteks and other flavored cigs (except, of course, menthol, Barack smokes (or smoked) Kools). The bill in question was H.R. 1256 the so-called "Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act".

The bill in question was basically written by Philip Morris and it's "supposed" aim is to prevent the sale of cigarettes designed to appeal to underage smokers. This is an utter farce. Nearly every underage person I know that smokes preferes Marlboro Reds or another similar (unflavored) smoke. None of them smoke the more expensive brands banned by this law. (Either that, or they're too busy smoking pot to be affected by a change in the tobacco regulations.)

Indonesia is going to be taking action before the World Trade Organization, on the basis that the ban descriminates in favor of domestic US products (to the detriment of Indonesian kretek producers) and will probally win. However, this offers little real hope. The WTO has no teeth, and like any other WTO ruling we disagree with, it'll be ignored.

The only good point of this change is that cigarette regulation was transfered to the Food and Drug Administration, a move I've favored for years. Perhaps now we'll finally get ingredients listings for smokes and regulation of toxic tobacco adulterants. I guess even a toxic rain cloud has a silver lining.

However, that's not enough to sooth my ire. As of September 22nd, various types alternative smokes will be illegal. This even goes so far as to include herbal smokes that contain no tobacco whatsoever. Ironically, flavored cigars are not covered by the ban. (Cigars are subject to a lower tax rate as well.)

I, for one, plan on illegaly importing my Blacks (it's tax free and cheaper anyhow) and encourage anyone who likes a tasty smoke to do the same.

I haven't made as much progress on updating the website as I would like, because of bugs in my system. These bugs are pretty easy to track down, I know exactly what causes them, but they're difficult to fix. Basically what it comes down to is that the menu system is poorly designed. While it produces great looking results, it's internals are a big mess and it needs to be majorly refactored.

The reason I haven't gotten around to this is mostly laziness. The menus are the most complicated part of the code. They are also the part I had (and still have) the least experiance with. As a result, any number of stupid things happen when things aren't just right. Minor typos can lead to total server errors, deleting an item won't remove it's menu entry (and vice versa), and the way they're stored in the database is pretty silly. In short, it's a nightmare.

They worked (just barely) when all they had to do was the blog system, pretty much because it was all automated. The article system added support for manual menu entry creation, but didn't do it right. It's all my fault for not thinking ahead when I designed it in the first place. I'll fix it, but it could take a while. Untill then, no content importing is gonna happen ... sorry.

Well, it took a little longer than I though it would (mostly because I improved some other stuff as well), but the overhaul of Black Knight's 'blog' and 'article' systems is complete. The first evidence of that is the new "About Me" section.

I still haven't implemented permalinks properly yet, but I've been hacking for a couple of days straight, so I'm gonna hold off on that for now. It's the next item on my adgenda though.

Now all I have to do is import the content from the old site. That might take a while though, because I want to review and clean up the content while I'm at it. Some stuff will get cut and some new stuff will probably be added.

Well, I got distracted by a video game coding project of mine and, as such, am a bit behind schedule on getting the rest of my website moved over here. However, I have made some progress on updating the backend.

I've built a more generic article system by heavily refactoring the existing blog system (mostly chopping out blog specific stuff) and it's working pretty well so far. The menu stuff still needs a lot of work and there's a few loose ends to tie up, but things are moving along pretty swiftly. However, it's not on the live site yet.

The reason for that is that I'm planning on reworking the blog system to build off the generic article system. At the moment, there is a lot of duplicate code between the two, which I would like to eliminate. Once I get that done (should only be a day or two), it's only a matter of importing the contents of the old site.

When I imported all my old blog posts, I did so in a quick and dirty fashion, so a lot of links where broken. Of these, a handful where relative links that pointed at various sections of the old site, so they didn't work here. However, the majority where simply link-rot due to the age of many of the posts.

Feeling that links that don't go anywhere are of no real use, even if historically interesting, I used the W3's Link Checker utility to locate all the broken links and fix them. So now all the links from my blog actually point to what they're supposed to. Yay!

On a related note, I've been working moving the contents of the old website over to the new site. However, some bits of the Black Knight codebase aren't quite ready yet. In particular, the menu subsystem is kinda' hackish at the moment and need some refactoring to really work. I hope to have that done sometime this week and then I'll start importing most of the old site's contents to here.

I'll also be fixing a little issue the blog has with regard to permalinks. At first glance, it appears to not have permalinks at all, but that's not quite true. Each article has an individual page at a stable location. Unfortunately, there's no way to locate said pages, unless you happen to know how the database works. That's pretty silly, so I'll be tweaking the blog system to generate links to those pages.

Due to some finacial difficulties, I had to let my web hosting lapse for a few months. But, I'm back up and running now. While things aren't totally set up at the moment (I've still got to set up the sub-domain handling and proxy stuff like I had it before), everythings going pretty smooth. (It was much easier this time around as opposed to the first time.)

I'm thinking about setting things up a little differently this time. Last time I had Apache serving the static content and proxying Black Knight. Now I'm thinking about using Lighttpd instead. Seeing as Black Knight's handling all the complicated stuff (and sucking up resources), I figure the rest should be as fast and small as possible.

Also, check out the brand new look. While I'm no superstar designer or anything, I have to say, this is the best looking web page I've ever built. It still has one little bug to fix, but I like it. (The bug's nothin' major. It just causes the carefully built vertical baseline to be several pixels off if there're any <code> or <pre> tags on the page.)

Introduction

The Uzebox is an open hardware project to create a retro style gaming console, you can purchase pre-build hardware, build one from a kit, or make your own. While I haven't yet gotten one myself (I'm kinda broke right now), it's an interesting project and I decided to play around with the emulator and setup a toolchain to allow me to experiment with writing my own code for it.

Setting up an Uzebox development enviroment under Debian is pretty easy. It should be about the same on other Linux distros, but I haven't tried it, so I can't say for sure.

Getting the Source Code

As there arn't (yet) any Uzebox packages, you'll have to compile the tools from source. The source is hosted in SVN at Google Code and can be downloaded with the following command:

svn checkout http://uzebox.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ uzebox-read-only

Compiling the Emulator

While it doesn't include a makefile, the emulator is simply one C source file, so it's pretty easy to build. However, it does require one edit. It improperly includes SDL.h as "SDL.h", when it should be <SDL\SDL.h>. In the current version, this is on line 41 of avr8.cpp. Or you can use the following sed command:

sed -i 's:"SDL.h":<SDL/SDL.h>:' avr8.cpp

As the GUI uses SDL, you'll need the SDL dev package to compile the emulator. If you don't already have it, you can istall it with:

apt-get install libsdl-dev

Assuming you've got a g++ installed, you can simply compile the emulator with the following command:

g++ -O3 -lSDL -march=pentium4 -o uzem avr8.cpp

Setting Up the Cross Compliation Enviroment

Luckily, Debian already has AVR dev tool packages availible. They can be installed with the following command:

apt-get install gcc-avr avr-libc

Enjoy!

I figured out what was up with the times on the blog posts I imported from MySpace, they where all in Pacific standard time. At least, as far as I can tell, I'm still not sure if all the post times are exactly accurate, but I think most of them are anyway.

Over on myspace itself, they're all still in PST. I don't know why (does Tom live out west?), but I haven't bothered to look into it either. Once I get around to writing my blog cross-posting module, I'll just purge the whole thing and then have the cross-poster put them all back (plus all the posts, like this one, that aren't on MySpace yet).